Mississippi by Anthony Walton

...Now, of course, Mississippi is substantially different politically, and to a certain extent, socially and racially-yet its formidable notoriety and singularity persist in the memories of those old enough to have known what was: the parents, for instance, of Anthony Walton, who left the state for the North before he was born, and who, in this documentary effort, that of a family, return there with him as he tries to comprehend their past, which is also his, and ours as Americans...

...He gives us his parents' experiences, and those of his kin, of their friends...

...Nor has the trek toward freedom, to Chicago and Detroit and Cleveland and the cities of the Northeast, spared former Mississippians a similar jeopardy-ghetto life, with all its threats to a people's family life, its spiritual legacy, traditions...

...Sometimes, cardiovascular imagery yielded to the neuropsychiatric kind, and we were told, in those "orientation sessions" which preceded the onset of the project, that Mississippi wasn't only a scene of fear and terror, but "a state of mind," or a place "where a war of nerves" was constantly being waged...

...contemporary reportage giving way to moral reflection...

...He does special honor to jazz and the blues, and even, in "A Sort of Chorus," bows out of the picture altogether, so that we may meet novelists, ordinary people, musicians, poets, look at photographs, contemplate passages from our Constitution, from the Bible-let a whole history come at us from different directions, with the author a behind-the-scenes conductor of sorts...

...Yet, out of that extended time of exceptional vulnerability came a stoic dignity as well as wounds, and it is the achievement of this book that both sides of that moral as well as racial story get told...

...His knowledge of the past, energized by his parents' experiences and recollections, can give him pause, every once in awhile, even prompt a moment of apprehension, as he makes his way across haunted, blood-drenched territory-counties where lynchings took place, where all the time one race lorded it over the other in every way possible...

...Although that story is by no means over, this book is a reminder of what has recently changed...

...A book's subtitle is more than earned-a private look into a family's past becomes "An American Journey": a tale of one state's fate becomes a great moral lesson for all of us, wherever we live...

...All through this marvelously evocative book we are graced with interviews-people of all sorts and conditions "tell us how it used to be," how it goes now, how they hope things will turn out in the years ahead...

...Some of his informants remember not "the good old days," but their own honorable efforts to live decent lives, no matter the hardships, the suffering-and contrast all of that with today's somewhat improved political and racial and economic climate, which has not, however, prevented drugs and crime and sexual promiscuity from taking serious hold...

...At times, the author gets caught in the inevitable tug between the past and present, between the South and the North...

...Still, they worked hard, prayed hard, sang hard, a tenaciously proud struggle to make do, to stand up to the constant threats, the terrible injustice imposed by a caste system whose grip was only loosened a generation ago, and then only after a strenuous fight...

...The author wants us to know about a state's history and geography, its ecology, its cultural and economic past...

...At times, Walton's subject matter and his compelling, lyrical, ironic voice bring to mind the James Agee of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men...

...Such ironies are put squarely before us by men and women uninterested in "resolving" (that cool, slippery word) this life's inconsistencies, paradoxes-though, the author does get told, unequivocally and over and over, that his people, his own ancestors, may have been given the rawest deal possible in this country...

...With his help we arrive at the destination he had in mind for himself, as well as us-a landscape of understanding that enables a coming-to-terms with nightmares all too commonly overlooked, refused the instructive scrutiny they deserve, demand...

...He gives us biographies of Richard Wright, Robert Johnson, Medgar Evers, Emmet Till...

...He also gives us his own experiences as he moves across the state in this last decade of the twentieth century-noticing, musing, listening, engaging with various others in various locales, situations...

...He dares long takes, short riffs on a variety of subjects-places, highways, foliage, individuals...

...He tells us about cotton and school teachers the way Agee did-detailed description, fluidly and invitingly presented...

...extended passages of prose interrupted by poems, and too, by the extraordinary photographs taken by the Farm Security Administration photographer Marian Post Wolcott, which in their dramatic, telling way offer silent witness to an American colonialism all too readily available for visual scrutiny...

...Like Agee, Walton is an author of southern ancestry who has gone back to the homeland, as it were-to explore and then assemble an account for others...

...He is a guest in the homes of the wealthy, the socially prominent, the well-educated, even as he talks with candor to the working people of both races...

...The result is a narrative of great strength, variety, authority: social history mingling with musicology...

...Like Agee, Walton does stretch, challenge the confines of the conventional essay...

...After all, the author is a man whose parents were born to the Mississippi tenant-farmer world, but who now moves with no great difficulty into all realms of that state...

...Robert Coles During the early 1960s, at the height of the civil rights movement in the South, even the tough-minded, daring young activists of SNCC (the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee) were given pause by the state of Mississippi: it had a reputation as the final bastion of segregation, the place where a last ditch stand would occur on behalf of the racial status quo-hence the "Mississippi Summer Project" of 1964, meant to "go for the heart, go for the jugular," as some young men and women kept putting it at the time...

...literary criticism keeping company with political analysis...

...Robert Coles is a child psychiatrist who teaches at Harvard, and the author, most recently, of The Call of Service: A Witness to Idealism...

...Fiefdoms fall in this book-all those academic and intellectual delineations of proper terrain...

...But it is Anthony Walton's voice that ultimately wins us over, carries us the distance he himself has traveled, carries us from places afar right to the Delta, to its melancholy music, to the back-breaking toil of the people who have lived there, to the soul-wrenching effort of so many to stay afloat morally and spiritually against such high odds...

...he has us following its roads and rivers, attending its music, its literary tradition, its terrible stories of hate, betrayal, murder...